Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
In June 2025, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told his regime at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran’s nuclear program would go on regardless of President Trump. “Our response to the US nonsense is clear: they cannot do a damn thing in this matter.”
A few weeks later, Iran’s underground nuclear program was rubble and a year later, Khamenei, who mocked any American efforts to negotiate, has joined his beloved nukes under the ground.
In early February, a top adviser to the commander of the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps dismissed the buildup of U.S. forces. “Even if America brings 12 aircraft carriers to the region, it can’t do anything,” he bragged. “America is defeated and incapable of any aggression.”
His commander is now dead along with Khamenei and elements of the regime’s leadership.
The Islamic Revolution that took over Iran had two slogans, “Death to America” and “America can’t do a damn thing against us”. Or “Marg bar Amrika” and “Amrika hich ghalati namitavanad bokonad.” The Ayatollah Khomeini had coined the latter slogan after raiding the American embassy and taking its people hostage while Jimmy Carter did nothing.
And America indeed did not do a damn thing.
Khomeini had outfoxed everyone, his former Marxist allies, the French and the Carter administration which was full of radicals eager to swap the Shah for Islamist rule. The Islamic theocrat had assured the Kennedy administration and then the Carter administration that he would be friendly to America and that Muslims and Christians made natural allies.
“You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” Khomeini, who would later make ‘Death to America’ into the regime’s slogan, assured Carter’s people.
“We would do a disservice to Khomeini to consider him simply as a symbol of segregated education and an opponent to women’s rights,” Philip Stoddard, the head of the State Department’s Intelligence Bureau, who had come out of the Saudi-funded Middle East Institute, argued.
For the next forty something years, Khomeini and his successor, Khamenei, went on killing Americans, murdering at least 869 U.S. military personnel across the Middle East, from the truck bombings in Lebanon to airline hijackings and IEDs across the Muslim world.
And “America can’t do a damn thing against us” remained an unchallenged slogan. Iran’s Islamic regime appeared to have Allah at their backs because they were able to brutally torture and murder Americans, make videos and recordings of it, and distribute them to the world.
While we did nothing.
The Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran to legitimize its nuclear program were greeted with the triumphal slogan, “America can’t do a damn thing against us” appearing on billboards and banners across Tehran and at speeches by Khamenei. By the time, Iran abducted and paraded around U.S. Navy sailors, the slogans appeared indisputable.
Then in 2020, Qasem Soleimani, the evil genius behind Iran’s worldwide terrorist networks, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was taken out near Baghdad by an American drone. In the regime’s eulogy, it declared that Soleimani had “deeply believed that America can’t do a damn thing against us.” Soleimani’s end was proof that his deeply held belief was worthless.
America’s inaction wasn’t a product of Allah’s intervention, but of moral weakness.
The Iran Lobby had invested deeply in Biden, going back to 2006, and saw in him another Carter. Iranian hackers intervened to help him win in 2020. Once Biden was in power, Iran launched a series of major escalations, targeting Israel with the Oct 7 attacks and international shipping with Houthi piracy out of Yemen. The Biden administration initially resisted, but then crumbled, pressuring Israel to make a deal with Hamas, and then refusing to go on the offensive against the Houthis in any consistent way, leading to the humiliation of the U.S. Navy.
In 2025, Trump was back, but last June the ayatollah was still assuring the faithful that America “cannot do a damn thing.“ Other clerics echoed him, in Bushehr, a major site of Iran’s nuclear program, a cleric claimed that “the US cannot do a damn thing to stop Iran’s nuclear progress.”
The airstrikes that soon followed proved them wrong.
America can do quite a bit. We didn’t. And that’s how we got an ‘endless war’. The more that Carter, Obama and Biden backed off and tried to make a deal, the more the Islamic regime became convinced that we were impotent and that it was invulnerable. Iran was never all that tough. Our leaders were simply weak and corrupt. The more aggressive Iran became, the more they backed down and looked for an exit ramp. Is it any wonder that Iran’s terror grew worse?
President Trump has taken the opposite approach, punishing Iran’s intransigence, instead of rewarding it, and making a mockery of its beloved slogan, “America can’t do a damn thing against us”. Iran never had Allah on its side. It had Carter, Obama and Biden.
Without appeasers in the White House, America can do a whole lot and the Islamic terrorists can do very little. The ayatollahs and their regime had gambled on the fecklessness and cowardice of their non-Muslim enemies. Over the last 6 years, their bets have started to fail. They’re popular at Columbia, UCLA and Harvard, but hated in their own cities, and President Trump has shown how weak they are underneath their cruelty and theological boasting.
The monsters who once hijacked, kidnapped, tortured and murdered Americans are afraid. They’re hiding out in their own capital because America is doing some damn things to them.
